If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I wish I understood better
what people mean when they use the words ‘irony’ and ‘ironic,’”
in describing books, movies or just the ordinary conversational
pronouncements of others, you could do a lot worse than take a
look at the object lesson provided by Restrepo, Tim
Hetherington’s and Sebastian “Perfect Storm” Junger’s little
documentary about some American airborne troops in Afghanistan in
2007-8. If you “get” its excursus into two different kinds of
irony, one intended and the other not, you will also get as an
extra added bonus a perfect illustration of why the now seemingly
inevitable repeal of Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
policy for dealing with the problem of homosexuality in our armed
forces is a terrible idea.
Irony is by its very nature ambiguous and hard to pin down,
but it can be defined as the tendency of meaning in
language or images to vary with their context. The first
kind of irony in Restrepo is self-conscious and
deliberate and the kind most common to movies, especially war
movies — the kind we call dramatic irony. Up until the end of
the movie, the chief example of it is the shot, obviously taken
on a shaky amateur video camera, in the movie’s opening scenes of
a young soldier on a train in civilian clothes and with a beer in
his hand while presumably on his way to join his unit. Smiling,
convivial, and clowning around boisterously with his companions,
presumably bound for the same place, he says to the camera that
he and his pals are “loving life and getting ready to go to
war.”
Oh-oh! By movie convention we instantly realize that this
personable young man, who turns out to be Pfc Juan “Doc”
Restrepo, is as good as dead. And, sure enough, the next thing we
know, one of his comrades in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan,
near the Pakistani border, is describing to us how he “bled out”
from his wounds while being helicoptered out of the valley
shortly after they arrived in it. His bosom pals name their new
forward operating base after him — which in turn gives its name
to the picture. The meaning of images of a tipsy youth’s bravado
about “going to war” is one thing when you know nothing more
about them than the images themselves and quite another thing
when you know that the youth was killed soon afterwards in the
war he was so looking forward to. But this bit of dramatic irony
only sets us up for the really big example of same at the very
end of the film when — spoiler alert! — a screen card tells us
that U.S. troops “withdrew from the Korengal valley in April,
2010.”
Suddenly, the meaning of everything we have seen in the
film up to this point, which is everything in the film, is
transformed. Triumph turns to futility in an instant and, though
it is understated, the anti-war “message” common to just about
every war movie made since the 1960s pops up once again with the
news that war is futile, pointless, and best not entered into at
all. Of course, the movie could hardly have been made without
this anti-war message, but it is remarkable how few of those who
have praised it as an authentic record of American soldiers in
combat have been able to recognize this as an ironic cliché. A.O.
Scott of the New York Times, for example,
is usually a pretty smart guy, but
he writes a very stupid thing, a very
New York Times-y thing, when he praises the authors
because “they reveal one of the irreducible, grim absurdities of
this war, which is the disjunction between its lofty strategic
and ideological imperatives and the dusty, frustrating reality on
the ground.” As if there could ever be any war without such a
disjunction.
Likewise, Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles
Times
writes glowingly of how the movie is
“told solely from the soldiers’ point of view. No politicians. No
generals. No military pundits. No activists on either side with
their pros and cons at the ready.” And that’s supposed to be a
good thing? That’s supposed to make it more “real”? Yet what is
this but to say that the soldiers’ strivings and sufferings have
been taken out of their political, military and diplomatic
context — which is, not coincidentally, the only context that
could give these things any meaning, in order to imply that there
is no meaning to their sacrifices. Didn’t we already see that
point made in
Apocalypse Now?
But the authors seem not quite to have intended the other
kind of irony that is present in their film. Another instance in
which meaning is radically altered by context occurs in a shot of
some horseplay among the airborne combat troops at their
dangerous outpost in which one of the men pipes up about another,
it’s not quite clear whom, that “He’s a beautiful man. I’d f***
him back in the States.” Without its context, this would be a
pretty unambiguous statement of homosexual lust, and one, too,
carrying the implication that they’re all “f***ing” each other in
Afghanistan but that this is only a makeshift and that a higher
standard of masculine pulchritude would be required back in the
states for them to engage in such behavior. In its context,
however, which is one of uproarious mirth, the soldier’s remark
is merely a form of male-bonding humor, a kind of dare to the
others even to think about taking him seriously — which their
laughter shows they don’t.
Why does what Ms. Sharkey calls this “sort of locker room
mentality” so often center on sex and, in particular, a
flirtation with the idea of homosexuality? Because the bond that
it creates among men in a dangerous situation whose lives, as
they all know, may well depend on that bond is a form of love.
The joking is all by way of demonstrating that that love between
them is of a very particular kind and that it is not
homosexual love. Obviously, the presence of people who were known
by the other men to be homosexuals would destroy any possibility
of such humor and, with it, this well-established ritual without
which those emotional bonds on which combat effectiveness depends
would be weakened. Much of the men’s time in the movie seems to
be spent in physical contact with each other, wrestling or
otherwise touching as part of an exercise routine. But when they
hilariously dance together to Samantha Fox singing:
This is the night, yeah
This is the night
This is the time we’ve got to get it right
(This is the night)
Touch me, touch me
I want to feel your body
Your heart beat next to mine —
it is an ironic demonstration of their powerful but
non-sexual attachment. Clearly, they know that. I wonder if the
film-makers do?
Literal demonstrations of the same attachment are given in
the film’s talking head interviews with the survivors about “Doc”
Restrepo and an on-screen account of Operation Rock Avalanche, in
which a popular sergeant is killed and another badly wounded. One
thing you can say for this movie is that, unlike some other
recent war films such as
Gunner Palace, the guys with
the camera really are in there among the men they are filming and
therefore getting shot at themselves. There are also comic
moments, as when the men eat a cow that has become entangled in
their concertina wire and had to be shot. When the cow’s owner,
one of the semi-hostile local Afghanis, complains, they find they
are unable to compensate him except by giving him the cow’s
weight in rice and beans — which must seem like a fair exchange
to the men, who presumably don’t get a lot of fresh meat.
On at least two occasions, the company commander, Captain
Dan Kearney mentions by name his predecessor at this outpost,
Captain Jim McKnight, who appears to have antagonized the local
population in a number of ways and in particular by sending
Taliban suspects to Bagram air base from where they have never
returned. Captain Kearney tells the gathering of local elders
that he has said that he is not Capt. McKnight and that they were
going to wipe the slate clean or get a new slate after the
latter’s departure. “I’m not like McKnight,” he tells them
reassuringly. But there is no follow-up, no investigation, no
spelling out of the deficiencies of the man, just innuendo. If I
were Captain McKnight, or his and Captain Kearney’s commanding
officer, I would be seriously unhappy about this. But as we have
recently learned, even our top generals are not immune to
speaking indiscreetly to journalists and causing scandal about
their colleagues.
And that, too, tells us something about the current state
of repair of those bonds between warriors of which
Restrepo gives us its ironic demonstration. The
Washington Post’s
report of the Americans’ withdrawal
from Korengal last April called it “a hard lesson in the limits
of American power and goodwill in Afghanistan” and averred that
General McChrystal and his advisers had “concluded that the
United States had blundered into a blood feud with fierce and
clannish villagers who wanted, above all, to be left alone. By
this logic, subduing the Korengal wasn’t worth the cost in
American blood” — even though the article also tells us that
there had only been one American combat death in the valley in
the ten months before the retreat. As the article’s author, Greg
Jaffe, writes, the risk is that “the withdrawal could offer proof
to other Afghans that U.S. troops can be forced out” — which is
another way of saying that they know the higher-ups in Kabul and
Washington do not feel, as the soldiers in this film do, any
particular reason to keep faith with the dead. Probably the film
will have done its own little bit to make its portrayal of
meaningless sacrifice into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ironic,
isn’t it?
